Health Notes
New hope for emphysema and COPD
When we ran across first article below (“Drugs seem to help…”) we wanted to share it because, as far as we knew, there WAS no help for COPD other than treating the symptoms. This was the first we’d heard about even a potential cure. However, in doing our due diligence we ran across the other articles from 2021 and 2020. It seems there’s a LOT of hope for all the current-and-ex-smokers out there, not just smoking mice!
Drugs seem to help regenerate mouse lungs damaged by cigarette smoke, Carissa Wong in New Scientist, Mar 2022
COPD damages so-called epithelial progenitor cells that normally regenerate the lining of the lungs, meaning they cannot repair themselves. Previous efforts at treating this have mainly focused on invasive cellular therapies such as stem cell implants, which provide a source of progenitor cells.
A drug-based treatment could be easier to use on a larger scale, either alone or in combination with other therapies. To identify one, Gosens and his colleagues analysed data previously collected from the lung tissue of people with COPD and mice exposed to cigarette smoke, as well as data from healthy people and mice, to find out which genes were more or less active in diseased lung tissues compared with healthy controls.
This allowed them to identify two proteins in epithelial progenitor cells that contributed to the disease and could be targeted using two existing drugs: iloprost, which is used to treat high blood pressure in lung arteries, and mioprostol, used to heal stomach ulcers…
Emphysema Reversed in Mice Given Injection of Healthy Pulmonary Endothelial Cells, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, Jul 2021
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian in New York have discovered that injecting mice with healthy pulmonary endothelial cells (ECs)—the cells that line the walls of blood vessels in the lung—can reverse the symptoms of emphysema. Their studies also implicated a gene called LRG1 as a driver of emphysema, and showed that deleting the gene from endothelial cells held back disease progression. The team suggested the findings may lead to new treatments for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), an inflammatory lung disease associated with smoking that is estimated to be the third leading cause of death worldwide…
Novel therapeutic approach shows promise in mice with COPD, by Hannah Balfour in Drug Target Review, Nov 2020
More than 250 million people suffer from COPD, a progressive inflammatory lung disease which is the third most frequent causes of death worldwide, behind heart attacks and stroke. The disease causes fibrosis and lung epithelial cell death, resulting in breathlessness and coughing with phlegm. There is currently no cure, despite intensive research, instead therapies focus on relieving symptoms and reducing the progression of the disease and its comorbidities (mainly muscle wasting). In severe cases, patients may require a lung transplant. By blocking the lymphotoxin beta receptor signaling pathway, researchers were able to prevent COPD progression and induce a full restoration of lung tissue…
